Tri Wiranto for Unsplash+
A year ago, I had a search set up on LinkedIn for "chief of staff." I'd get maybe one notification a week. Sometimes none.
Now it's relentless. New roles, new threads, new takes. Lots of explainer posts and hiring frameworks. Everyone, it seems, has something to say about what a great Chief of Staff actually does.
And I keep reading it, waiting to feel good about it but I don't.
I wonder if this role has always worked in large part because most people couldn't quite describe it. There was a useful ambiguity to it like wait, what do they actually do? that created just enough mystery to give the role room to operate. Then the Chief could move through an organization quietly, hold information, filter it and shape thinking without anyone fully tracking the mechanism. That opacity was useful.
But now I’m afraid we're explaining it away.
Every post that breaks the role into “four clean responsibilities" and every thread that frames it as "the CEO's force multiplier," are actually flattening our role in ways that’s starting to cost us something.
What makes a Chief of Staff effective isn't the part that fits in a post. It's the judgement you develop after sitting close to real decisions for long enough that you stop having to think about it. You hear everything. You pass through what matters and hold what doesn't. You protect the leader's thinking without them always knowing you're doing it. The more we try to describe it, the more we water it down into something that performs well online and functions less well in the room.
I’ve noticed something else too. The loudest voices in this conversation are almost never the ones doing the work. The best Chiefs I know aren't publishing about it. They've been with the same leader for three, five, seven years. They're trusted in ways that are hard to explain and impossible to credential.
So what are we actually building when we keep talking about this? My concern is that we're teaching leaders to want something they might not actually need, because the version they're seeing isn't reality.
Our role is built on service. WE are not the point. The work is the point, the leader is the point, the outcome is the point. The Chiefs who do this well have internalized that so completely that visibility isn’t even a consideration. So when I see people building personal brands around how essential this role is… they missed the whole point.
The role is getting louder, which isn’t the same as getting better.
I don't have a fix for this. You can't stop a conversation once it's started. But I do think the Chiefs who understand what's at stake already know what to do: keep doing the good work in service to your principal, your team and your org. Build quietly. Hold what needs to be held. And lean on each other for the hard nuanced stuff. Keep asking each other the hard questions that don't have a clean answer. Those are the emails I get and that's what I want RHB to be.
We don't need all the hubbub to grow this role. We just need to stay focused and keep working it, together, and mostly out of sight.
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